To the extent that realists like Hagel and Colin Powell voted for or promoted many of the GOP’s foreign-policy mistakes I agree with Ross. They were and are part of the problem.

But the solution I sometimes hear from conservative thinkers who aren’t committed to any particular foreign policy is paradoxical. They advise working within the GOP and conservative movement: avoid upsetting anyone, and if you’re nice enough, eventually everyone will listen to you. This is exactly what has led realists—think of Powell selling the Iraq War at the UN, or Hagel’s own vote for the war—into policy failure and rhetorical inconsistency.

Realism’s virtue lies in the power of its critique. If that critique has to be muted in order to get a hearing sometime down the road, it in fact won’t be heard at all. What little sound anyone might pick up from a Powell or Dick Lugar would only be an echo of the strident notes trumpeted by the most aggressive players in the conservative movement and GOP.

Hagel’s performance before the Senate Armed Services Committee was so underwhelming because he played the game. He is, in fact, a very mainstream guy on foreign policy: by 2006 he was against the Iraq War, just as the country was, and voted against the Surge; but in 2003 he was for the war, again just as the country then was. He’s frustrated by the leverage the various Israel lobbies (Sheldon Adelson being somewhat different from AIPAC) wield over discussions of U.S. foreign policy, but in this he’s no different from Peter Beinart or J Street, who are not exactly radicals in the eyes of anyone but an extremist like Adelson.

Hagel wasn’t just tailoring his answers to his interrogators’ tastes: he genuinely, I think, believes that realists should not be too robust in their criticisms; they should stick with the policy and political consensus, even if their better judgment tells them the consensus is wrong—and even if, in less guarded moments, they have given voice to their better judgments in the past. It’s the quality of a diplomat, and an old-guard politician, to value agreement over (for lack of a better word) truth.

Republican Party realists have habitually followed this insider path; it’s practically bred into their WASP bones. And in an older Washington, and an older media environment—in a world where the manners of the conservative movement, for example, were those of William F. Buckley and James Burnham—this approach worked. Realists got their turn to speak, and if they were unheeded, they shut up and went along.

Washington has changed. The right and the Republican Party have changed even more. Gentility is no longer the idiom. We saw during the Hagel hearing how little a Ted Cruz cares for civility. And for a Tea Party insurgent like Mike Lee, his own understanding of truth will always trump consensus. Hierarchical deference, nuanced thought, and manners being more important than winning are out; Manichean worldviews and megaphones are in. (American politics has always has a bit of both words, but the balance in the GOP now tilts heavily toward populism.)

Realists cannot simply make timid criticisms, smile, and loyally follow the GOP to war today—they can’t do that and remain realists, and really they can’t even do that and remain in public life, as Dick Lugar has shown and Chuck Hagel may learn. Nobody in today’s Republican Party is willing to listen to softly spoken qualms and hedged critiques about life or death matters.

But clearly Republican realists cannot outbid the new breed of Tea Party neocons when it comes to demagoguery. The style is part of the substance: you simply can’t rile up a crowd or appeal to paranoid billionaires if you don’t paint an oversimplified picture of the world. The subtle thinking that is the realists’ signal virtue is impossible if one has to frame it in crude language, just as surely as good character is impossible if one thinks it can be expressed by bad behavior.

This is a very difficult lesson for many good people in Washington to accept—it’s difficult to accept because it means that the technique they use in their own heads to reconcile what they really believe with the stupid things their party does simply will not work. Only the belief that any set of words or any kind of action can really stand for a totally different type of thought or character can bridge the gulf between conscience and party. This isn’t Machiavellianism so much as a way to expiate guilt.

But if Republican realists can’t go along, and if they can’t frame realism in the emotional language the Fox-fed GOP base demands, what can they do? Confronted by Tea Party senators and billionaire-backed pundits who insist that one cannot be both a realist and a Republican, perhaps the only sensible course is not to be a Republican. This is already, evidently, the course many realists have adopted, and it exactly parallels the migration of neoconservatives out of the Democratic Party of George McGovern in the 1970s. Realists, like neoconservatives, are few in number, but each exodus has suggested that something fundamental was wrong with the party in question—something that before long had serious electoral consequences.

The only other course for Republican realists is to emphasize the power of their critique over the prospect of short-term political impact. In practice this would mean a.) being true to realism’s own style of civility and nuanced discourse, rather than trying to out-emote the Tea Party, but b.) being sufficiently willing to break with consensus that one no longer downplays important criticisms, as Hagel has, in hopes of getting a fair hearing from partisans determined not to listen. This won’t win you appointment as secretary of defense, but as the costs of U.S. foreign policy continue to mount, realists may find over time that they have a wider and wider audience—of Republicans as well as Democrats and independents. Let reality reassert itself; King Canute couldn’t turn back the tide, and neither can any Tea Party or fanatical billionaire. When the public, and thereafter either party, feels the pressing need for better policy, the realists will be there to provide it.

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46 Responses to Can a Realist Be a Republican?

Kerry is treated like an old crony at his hearing and Hegal is treated like a punching bag. Why? Because Kerry, with his old school tie, his Raytheon stock, and his Agribusiness wife is part of the club. Hegal is an uppity farm boy who doesn’t understand that the role of government is to keep elites rich and powerful. Clearly a dangerous corn pone.

The tea party had zero to do with international politics and everything to do with domestic issues, I see the American Conservative is using the same language to demonise the tea party as places like salon or mother jones. I don’t like the Israel lobby and I don’t like neocons, but the way that Hagel is being described here, that he is a mainstream guy and will follow whatever the popular consensus, that is not an admirable quality

The Tea Party has had four years now to think about foreign policy, but guys like Cruz and Lee haven’t come up with any ideas of their own and have adopted the worst attitudes of the neocons. Survey after survey has shown that self-identified Tea Partiers are more pro-war than the rest of the GOP. It’s time to stop being in denial about this.

….was a time when the Tea Party moniker meant something akin to limited government….. Dick Armey has done an excellent job of making them no more than an arm of the neo-cons….
I had hoped some of them were brighter than that…..
Well, another illusion shattered….

Hagel just looks like a dunce. You can make excuses,but he looked unprepared. Even for friendly questions. Not sure what made him a great choice,except that it’s kind of a shot at Republicans,trying to divide them.
As for if a “realist”can be a Republican,can we first define what “realiust”means. The Libya intervention and embrace of the :Arab Spring”are hardly realist. Supporting ground troops in Kosovo,which Hagel supported,is not really what I call “realist”. Actually,kind of the horror,neocon.

The Tea Party has always been a fraud, a cover group for frightened, older, well-off white people, who only got worried that we are going into bankruptcy once a black, old-school liberal with an exotic name got into the White House.

They didn’t make a peep when W. was launching counter-productive trillion dollar wars on borrowed money and creating a security state. The Tea Party is just a big, cultural cringe, a reactionary tribe who wouldn’t know “liberty” if it bit them on the hind quarters.

Sorry, but this is pure twaddle, the likes of which has become far too common here. Hagel’s performance was embarrassingly horrible. He was incoherent. And not because Lindsey Graham badgered him, but because he didn’t have a clue what the Hell he was talking about. TAC has done itself , and the cause of a more modest foreign policy, great damage making such a cause of Hagel. His primary qualification to this administration was not that he holds “realist” views on foreign policy, but that the GOP was likely to be pissed off at his nomination. You, and Larison, ought to be embarrassed to be touting such an unqualified loser.

“The Tea Party has had four years now to think about foreign policy, but guys like Cruz and Lee haven’t come up with any ideas of their own and have adopted the worst attitudes of the neocons”

That might be true for Ted Cruz, but Mike Lee? In his two years in office the Junior Senator from Utah has been a libertarian-leaning conservative. On issues like the USA PATRIOT Act, NDAA, FISA, and Libya, the Senator has either voted against each one or attempted to reform them working with Senator Paul From Kentucky. His opposition to the Hawks and the National Security state even won him the irritation of the Wall Street Journal, and some praise from this magazine. If he does sounds hawkish sometimes it is for the same reasons Rand Paul does it, to appeal to a conservative base that is still more hawk than dove.

I went to a number of t-party meetings in my area and found I only got along with the younger people who were worried about the 2nd amendment and the obsession with war making. All the people my age (55+) complained incessantly about big government, national health insurance, how are military is a heroic organization, and that Pres. Obama was a muslim or a communist. When I ask who was on social security, it was a majority, I then asked wasn’t this socialized retirement and med. insurance? Everyone got all huffy and puffy. Some looked as if the were high on pot. The t-party was a real mishmash of weird people. Dare I say crackpots?

Very provocative piece, Daniel. I have thought the same thing for a while now, which is why I also left the party years ago. Am still a conservative but the GOP is now filled with more chickenhawks than deficithawks. It’s sad really. Also, I question the true patriotism of the neocons who seem to care about Israel at least as much as our country. Supporting Israel so much doesn’t actually make them more patriotic, but less. Am very afraid of what’s become of my country after hearing so much talk about Israel yesterday. I almost wish Senator Hagel would have come back into the hearing after the first break while dancing to the tune of hava nagila and maybe it might have helped his chances.

The only cure for the dispiriting display of toadying by putative Tea Party Senators in Thursday’s hearing is for members of the Tea Party to communicate to those Senators their profound displeasure. I have already communicated that message to members of the Ron Paul Tea Party who were delegates to last year’s Republican National Convention, and I hope the message carries. If not, the Tea Party as a force for fiscal responsibility in government and adherence to the the U.S. Constitution is dead and may as well furl its banner and go home.

Excellent piece. Ultimately the intellectually valid ideology of the Neocons will run out of other people’s children to use as cannon fodder to fight their battle for world wide nation building and regime change regardless of cost, lives lost or hope of achieving any articulable goal. The populist and low IQ appeal of the Neocons will run it’s course.

The neo-cons and the iIsrael firsters are overplaying their hand. If these hearings do nothing they reveal who really is in control of American Foreign policy as the sock puppers of AIPAC fall over each other to pledge loyalty to Israel.It’s over reach, and even a public that pays more attention to the explotis of Honey Boo Boo, and the Kardasians will some day awaken to demand an America first foreign policy

“… perhaps the only sensible course is not to be a Republican. This is already, evidently, the course many realists have adopted, and it exactly parallels the migration of neoconservatives out of the Democratic Party of George McGovern in the 1970s. Realists, like neoconservatives, are few in number, but each exodus has suggested that something fundamental was wrong with the party in question—something that before long had serious electoral consequences.”

I agree with other points made in this article, but the reasoning in this part doesn’t work. So the realists of the Republican Party today “directly parallel” the NEOCONSERVATIVES from the Democratic Party in the 1970’s? I thought the neocons were a major part of the problem that realists have with the GOP today. Seems to me that the neocons who went from one party to the other in the ’70’s were just following the shift in power, which took place for a number of reasons, and culminated in the Reagan presidency.

Your experience is similar to mine, but about the only young people at the local meetings were candidates for office and my 16 year old son. They beat the incumbent Congresswoman, Jean Schmidt, with Brad Wenstrup, a doctor from Cincinnati. So far, he does what Boehner tells him to do, more so than Jean ever did. It will be interesting to see if they admit to a mistake or turn on him, too.

I don’t agree with your characterization of the so-called Tea Party. The Tea Party is irrelevant to this problem, which began several decades ago prior to its existence. The number one culprit is FOX News, which at times seems to operate as a propaganda front organization for AIPAC and Likud. But there is a much bigger problem, and it involves BOTH political parties. To use former Senator Hagel’s formulation, most of our senators from both parties have become Senators for the State of Israel. Major donors with ties to Israel have bought and paid for these politicians, and their fanatical loyalty to their donors was on display on Thursday.

“The tea party had zero to do with international politics and everything to do with domestic issues”

Here’s the problem: said ‘nothing to do with international’ group just placed a batch of their representatives into a political sector that very much has a LOT to do with international politics. If the tea party didn’t want to be involved, then WHY is tea-party backed Ted Cruz wasting time even talking to Hagel?

@The article

One thing to include as a possibility, especially if there’s plans to ditch the entire party, is education. Get down to the ground and get to teaching people about how the system works. I know I would’ve loved a place like this years ago.

As far as keeping civil, it’s something I tell individuals when dealing with management at work or folks dealing with stubborn companies: Be kind, but insistent. Don’t raise your voice to yell, but don’t stop speaking. You don’t need to interrupt to ask a question, but every empty moment will be filled with that question. You can the gabbermouth talk but he’s not leaving you till you had your word.

I see why you are critiquing Hagel’s performance in terms of realists in (and out) of the Republican Party as your topic.

However, in terms of this hearing, the critique should be universal. The Levin and Shummer remarks before the confirmation paved the way for Republican conservatives – Ahab-like in their obsessions with Israel and Iran – to hyjack the hearing to impose their litmus tests that are at odds with Administration policy. As with the first Presidential debate, the WH had no back up plan and no Democrats to effectively deflect the onslaught against their President’s nominee. Your McGovern campaign reference was appropriate in more ways than one: Hagel was left hanging by Democrats who still fear the power of neoconservatism. It was disgusting.

John McCain did his best to coerce Hagel into saying the “surge” was a “success” and Hagel had been wrong to opposed the surge in Iraq. McCain failed. Hagel is quite right to think History may very well show the “surge” was a blunder.

the original pre-cooptation Tea Party was Perotista,
anti-war and anti-Wall Street, with ranks which realized Obama was more Zionist Lobby/Wall Street servant than Muslim and commie, able to cooperate with OWS on essential causes.

unfortunately it had less staying power than OWS, which
is saying something not very nice.

Jim Canning, above.Hagel is quite right to think History may very well show the “surge” was a blunder.

Understatement. Please.
Without exploring any of the other failed surge pre-implementation criteria, it is more than enough to cite the number of innocent Iraqis who have died from political violence since the “success” of the surge.

I’m just going to go ahead and say that the author has absolutely no grasp of what realism is, in either theory or practice. Chuck Hagel is far from a realist; he’s an almost militant liberal institutionalist who’s enamored with similar ideas from Joe Nye, Richard Haass, Steve Van Evera and Robert Keohane. Their preferred policies (and their worldviews) stem from the idea that we can all get along, in a purely consensus based world at the international and domestic levels of politics; again, this has nothing to do with realist theory or realist policy. You reveal your shocking ignorance of international relations in general when you try to paint these ideas as realist when nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, while there are myriad permutations of realism (btw, Neocons are half offensive realist and half liberal institutionalist, it’s an inherently contradictory worldview at the theoretical level and bears practically no operational resemblance to realism) the one thing that the various branches of realism agree on is that at the end of the day the only thing that matters is power. Chuck Hagel, in any of his myriad forms, wouldn’t be caught dead ever agreeing to that.

“John McCain did his best to coerce Hagel into saying the “surge” was a “success” and Hagel had been wrong to opposed the surge in Iraq. McCain failed. Hagel is quite right to think History may very well show the “surge” was a blunder.”

This a 1000 times. Hagel could have shut down McCain and made him look like the idiot neocon that he is. All he had to do is say “you are asking me to make a black or white judgment without nuance about the success or failure of the surge when it is much too early to know. The true implications of our 10 year long war in Iraq may not reveal itself for decades or more. And the fact that you do not understand that Senator McCain is of great concern.”

The entire Obama administration can be charachterized as the manipulation of hope. By using Hagel as a wedge to highlight the minor differences between how he governs and how the GOP governs, he is able to gain the hopes of prinipled voters, while keeping up the hopes of his partisans. The true brilliance here is that by playing against the fears of his partisan opponents, he is able to manipultae them into playing the role he needs them to, and these partisans are all to happy to play along because such shenanigans only feed into the hopes of thier unprinipled and ignorant voters and donors.

Of course this isnt about Hagel, or Obama even, its about the political puppet theater that entrenched interest in Washington use to get all our hopes up, one half of the country at a time. Im surprised the minds at TAC keep falling for it.

“Realism’s virtue lies in the power of its critique. If that critique has to be muted in order to get a hearing sometime down the road, it in fact won’t be heard at all. What little sound anyone might pick up from a Powell or Dick Lugar would only be an echo of the strident notes trumpeted by the most aggressive players in the conservative movement and GOP”

I am reading Robert McNamara’s book ‘In Retrospect” A public official willing to confess error and explain what went wrong. Albeit a little late.

The fifth column that drove out paleos and brought in neocons has two objectives 1. absolute loyalty to a foreign ethno supremacist state and 2. native displacement through amnesty combined with legal immigration dumps shifting the labor supply curves down sharply.

Just as Buckly, Hannity, and O’Reilly cheer led the treason lobby on Palestine, so now the Rubio Cruz s column will lead the embrace of a new immigrant majority.

The urgan white/ Roman church facet of the Hannity-Cruz alliance with neocon-ism can no longer be ignored. They all share the objective of running up the score against the displaced fly over country anglo saxon and african american protestants.

Thus the only truly conservative alliance still possible for resistance is then the banding together of non coastal protestant whites, african americans, and other ethnicitities religions against the coastal urban suburban cosmopolitans.

The Tea Party Patriots’ mission is to restore America’s founding principles of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets.
OUR CORE PRINCIPLES

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY means not overspending, and not burdening our children and grandchildren with our bills. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity [is] swindling futurity on a large scale.” A more fiscally responsible government will take fewer taxes from our paychecks.

CONSTITUTIONALLY LIMITED GOVERNMENT means power resides with the people and not with the government. Governing should be done at the most local level possible where it can be held accountable. America’s founders believed that government power should be limited, enumerated, and constrained by our Constitution. Tea Party Patriots agree. The American people make this country great, not our government.

FREE MARKET ECONOMICS made America an economic superpower that for at least two centuries provided subsequent generations of Americans more opportunities and higher standards of living. An erosion of our free markets through government intervention is at the heart of America’s current economic decline, stagnating jobs, and spiraling debt and deficits. Failures in government programs and government-controlled financial markets helped spark the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Further government interventions and takeovers have made this Great Recession longer and deeper. A renewed focus on free markets will lead to a more vibrant economy creating jobs and higher standards of living for future generations.

In his openining statement at the Hagel hearing, the foolish Republican senator from Oklahoma, James Inhoffe, denounced Hagel for supporting Iran’s admission to the World Trade Organization! What an idiot!

“Realists cannot simply make timid criticisms, smile, and loyally follow the GOP to war today—they can’t do that and remain realists, and really they can’t even do that and remain in public life…”

They can’t do that and remain responsible American citizens either. Realists must take off the gloves and call the neoconservatives and interventionists what they are: traitors who have traduced us into an imperial overreach that is destroying us. Their treachery consists in having encouraged this overextension in order to benefit a foreign power: Israel, and to increase the gross wealth of global corporations that no longer have any organic connection to the American nation. Thus they cannot be treated as though they are Americans like the rest of us, as acting in good faith, with whom we merely disagree. They must be treated as an enemy within, confronted at every turn, and expelled from public life.

My wing of the Tea Party has no love for big government interventionists. Cruz is just spitting up a lot of predigested neocon foreign policy rot that he probably doesn’t even understand. He needs some new staffers to tell him what to think.

“Realism” — as usual here, is a codeword for an unrealistic effort to appease America’s enemies by betraying her friends. Ron Paul has more realistic foreign policy views than Hagel or Beinart.
J-street purpose is to lobby the American government to impose on Israel policies rejected by 80-90% of Jewish Israelis as unrealistic. It is unrealistic to see them as anything but radical.
Colin Powell’s problem was not that he was a realist, but that he was 1) wrong about Iraq’s WMDs and 2) wrong about the way forward in Iraq after the invasion (on this see Douglas Feith’s book).
A genuine realist would cut back America’s foreign policy commitments to suit her resources. Obama’s Libyan war, as it sequels have shown, fails that test in spades.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Dorothy Rabinowitz attacked Hagel for having made the true statement that Iran’s government was legitimate. And she argued it was irrelevant that most of America’s allies have embassies in Tehran! Typicl rubbish from WSJ on Iran.